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By Root 417 0

lost the house by then—and we were living in a minimally furnished apartment on the edge of town. There was the usual arguing between my mother and Johnny over his drinking and his inability to hold a job. On this night the shouting intensified, and I heard Johnny say something like, “The hell with this. I’m finished with this shit.” He was opening and closing drawers, and I guessed he was throwing clothes in a grocery bag to move out. Listening to their fight from my bedroom, and then hearing the finality of John’s statement, made me break down. I began to shake and sob. I went into the bedroom where they had been arguing, and for the first time ever I confronted him. “You can’t leave,” I said. “You’re part of this family.” I must have been a sorry sight, shaking and in tears, and they both looked at me with surprise. Their eyes seemed to say, Why are you so upset? My shaking left them both silent, and briefly chastened.

My mother wanted her boys to be men. Men were strong. At seventeen I was a man in her eyes. She worried that I lacked the grit to get through the really tough times. Her attitude was rooted in her own experience. Life for her had been a succession of disappointments: being forced to quit high school to work; a first marriage that became almost immediately oppressive and then violent; a second marriage, to a man she deeply loved but who was dissolving in alcoholism; long days and weeks of work in the beauty shop. Life was about survival, and survival meant not giving in to sadness or loss. She kept me close, and I was always her confidant and principal adviser when trouble entered her life, which was often, yet at the same time she feared I would turn into a momma’s boy. This was one of the tensions that defined our relationship. Was I her father or son? As I grew up, I could see she was convinced I would be successful in some profession and bring her honor, and her certitude gave me a powerful confidence outside of our small family unit, but she also thought she was sending a son into the world with a handicap—something, in her mind, akin to a club foot or cleft lip. I lacked her ferocity, and ferocity was necessary to make one’s way in the world. As a consequence, I got the attention and praise that is often lavished on a sickly or sensitive child.

Amid the trouble at home, I had escaped to two places—the woods and the library. The loss of the house meant the loss of easy access to the woods, which had been my privilege whenever I wanted it, right out the back door. Once we moved back into town, I spent my entire Saturdays at the Bishop Memorial Library in Toms River. This library, with its big wooden tables, stacks of books and a mezzanine with a milky glass floor, became a second home for me. I sat in a Windsor chair with a small seat pad and wooden arms, from which I read books and magazines as the light shifted sides in the library from morning to late afternoon. The chair itself struck me as representative of a literary life. We had nothing like it at home, and it was better made than anything at school. The library’s walls were hung with portraits, landscapes and maps, and its tall windows, which pleasantly framed berry-bearing bushes outdoors, had deep varnished wooden sills upon which I sometimes stacked the books I had gathered for that day’s reading. As the hours went by, I would work my way down a pile of six or eight.

I even managed to transform these impulses—for being in the woods and for reading—into the prospect of a career. I decided to become a wildlife biologist and was eventually admitted to the University of New Hampshire’s school of forestry. I already had read all of Aldo Leopold and a lot of John Muir and Henry Thoreau and been through every copy of the town library’s collection of Scientific American magazine. I had a good working knowledge of cell biology.

My commitment to forestry crumbled, however, when I took my first literature class. The English professor introduced me to Emerson, who proved the perfect bridge between my two favorite places, the woods and the library.